Another stabbing. Another headline. Another round of thoughts and prayers followed by absolutely nothing changing.

The day before this attack, a friend of mine had his front door kicked in. His wife was home with their baby when the attacker got inside and tackled her to the ground — both of them on the floor. My friend was able to get to her in time, fight the attacker off, and get his wife and baby out safely. It could have ended very differently. It didn’t, because he was there and he was ready.

These stories aren’t rare anymore. They’re routine. And every time one happens, the same question follows: what if someone there had been armed? The answer is simple. It would have changed everything.

I grew up in California, and firearms were part of my life from an early age. My family ran a nonprofit helping families with food, clothing, and furniture — the kind of work that puts you face to face with people at their most vulnerable. It also put a target on us. Before I turned 18, my family endured 14 attempted break-ins and two attempted murders. That reshaped how I saw the world. I got serious about firearms training, earned my National Rifle Association instructor certifications, and kept building from there. Then came the Chabad of Poway shooting. Watching an attack unfold in a synagogue — a place that’s supposed to be safe — prompted me to take action. I started teaching publicly, and it grew into a full training operation. Today I run “The Tactical Rabbi,” a firearms and security training brand with a YouTube channel that’s crossed 35 million views and a growing presence on Instagram, where I break down concealed carry, active-shooter response, and security preparedness for anyone wanting to learn.

I’ve spent years watching regular people — parents, business owners, synagogue members — try to navigate the maze of legal protections. In New York, that maze is a nightmare and for many, hard to work through.

New York is technically a “shall issue” state now, post-Bruen (the June 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen recognizing a constitutional right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense). On paper, the Supreme Court forced the state’s hand. In practice, New York found a new way to make the right to self-defense functionally unreachable for most people. To get a carry license, an applicant has to complete 16 hours of classroom instruction, plus two hours of live-fire training, submit four character references, sit for an in-person interview, and pass a background process that, in my experience, takes an average of six months — and commonly can stretch past a year.

An attorney once put it to me this way, and I haven’t heard it said better: if New York actually cared about safety, the ratio would be flipped — sixteen hours of live-fire and safe-handling training, two hours of legal seminar. Instead, it’s the opposite. The overwhelming majority of mandated time isn’t spent teaching people to operate a firearm safely. It’s spent walking them through everything they’re not allowed to do. That’s not a safety program. That’s a liability shield with a permit slip attached. And that’s before you factor in the cost — training, fingerprinting, application fees, lost work hours — which adds up to something far beyond a minor inconvenience. For someone working full-time or living on a tight income, six months to a year of cost and paperwork isn’t a deterrent. It’s often a hard stop.

Even after someone clears every hurdle and gets approved, New York’s list of “sensitive locations” strips the license of most of its value. Subways. Times Square. Public transit. The exact places where violent crime is most concentrated and where the value of self-defense is most needed are off limits. The state hands you a license in one hand and takes back the protection with the other. To be clear, I don’t think every requirement is worthless. A seminar on the legal use of force has real value. Live-fire training has real value. The problem isn’t that New York asks people to be trained and responsible. The problem is how it’s built — layered, slow, and expensive in a way that has far more to do with discouraging applicants than preparing them.

New Jersey’s process, by comparison, is a two-hour seminar plus a 50-round live-fire qualification across three to 15 yards. That’s it. It’s faster, cheaper, and — frankly — makes more sense as an actual proficiency test than New York’s process. Approval times run dramatically shorter than New York’s. I still don’t think New Jersey’s system is where it should be, constitutionally. But if I had to choose between the two states as they stand today, it isn’t close. Meanwhile, most of the country has moved toward constitutional carry — which is closer to how the Second Amendment was actually written and intended to function. More states should be moving in that direction, not away from it.

People will say these hurdles exist because lawmakers want gun ownership to stay rare. That misses the bigger picture. The Second Amendment wasn’t written to manage a hobby. It was written as a check against tyranny and, just as importantly, as a guarantee that every individual has the right to defend themselves and the people they love. That right doesn’t mean much if the state can regulate it into practical non-existence while still calling it “shall issue.”

And there’s a second half to this problem that doesn’t get talked about enough: the revolving-door approach to repeat offenders in cities like New York. When people with long, documented histories of arrests face little to no real consequence, you remove any incentive for a would-be attacker to hesitate. Deterrence works both ways — an armed, trained citizen is one form of deterrence; real consequences for violent behavior are another. Weaken both at the same time, and you shouldn’t be surprised when incidents like stabbings and other violent crimes keep happening.

I’m constantly asked where to start, and I always come back to the same comparison: learning to drive. The first time you get behind the wheel, it’s intimidating — you don’t know what you’re doing, and that uncertainty is real. But with the right instructor, proper training, and time behind the wheel, that discomfort turns into competence. A firearm is no different. It’s a tool. Treated seriously, trained on properly, and understood clearly, it becomes something you can rely on rather than fear. That’s the piece so many of these processes get backward. They spend their energy trying to make people afraid of the tool instead of competent with it. Fix that, and you fix most of what’s actually wrong with the system.

There are many fantastic resources and firearms instructors across the country — people who know the laws and people who follow everything Second Amendment-related. For example, if you are worried about owning or bringing a firearm into your home, Yehuda Remer, also known as The Pew Pew Jew, has a series of children’s books that talk about gun safety and living with firearms in your home. He also has a history of the Second Amendment so you and your child can learn about its importance and why we have it. He is a Second Amendment activist living in Texas who educates children and parents about those rights. His work and advocacy span the better part of 15 years, during which he has called for everyone to arm themselves, especially Jews. Since October 7, his voice has been an important wake-up call for Jews around the country to pick up a firearm, train, and survive.

If any of this resonates — if you’ve been sitting on the fence about getting trained, getting licensed, or just learning how to think about your own safety — don’t wait for the next headline to decide for you. Reach out. Find me on YouTube and Instagram as The Tactical Rabbi, or drop me a line at info@thetacticalrabbi.com. I’m happy to help point you in the right direction.

Or you can reach out to The Pew Pew Jew at www.thepewpewjew.com or email him at thepewpewjew@gmail.com.

***

Rabbi Raziel Cohen is a firearms instructor and security consultant known as “The Tactical Rabbi.” His YouTube channel has surpassed 35 million views, and he shares ongoing training content on Instagram.

Yehuda Remer is an award-winning Second Amendment advocate who has published 10 books and has appeared on media outlets including Fox News, ABC News, and other publications.

Menu

New York Doesn’t Want You Armed, The Bureaucracy Proves It